vCloud Automation Center is the VMware hybrid cloud self-service provisioning portal. It can be customized to extend its OOTB functionality. The following tutorial shows how from the vSphere web client create a menu operation to run a program in a guest or how to do it automatically once the VM has been provisioned. This does not involve any scripting !

vCO integration with vSphere web client (out of the box with windows installation of vCenter, follow this guide to do it with the vCO appliance). If you do not have the integration you can still do this tutorial using the vCO client.

Running a program in a guest VM

There are countless use cases for running a program within a guest VM. For example post provisioning scripts / software installation. With the following guest operation method you do not need to have the VM accessible remotely through the network, you just need to have appropriate VM credentials.

In the vSphere web client type as below in the search field.

Right click / Run a workflow.

Enter the VM credential, select the VM.

Enter the program you want to run with its full path.Here it is a Windows VM but it could be a Linux host as well. Starting notepad remotely is not really useful but you get the idea.

Make sure it ran successfully since we will need this for the rest of the tutorial.

This step was not mandatory but we needed to make sure you have the settings right and it will also make our life easier later.

Installation of the vCAC extensibility package for vCO

The package is now part of the 5.2 plug-in.

If not done already install it with searching and running the following workflow. If you did this already you can skip to the next section.

Select your vCAC host.

You can leave the defaults on this screen.

And on this one as well. You can create up to 16 vCO menus.

You can run this workflow again any time if you need to change any of the settings.